About the Project
The
March, 1968, Command Chronology for 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, reported:
At 291405H, C-3 received six rounds
of estimated 120mm mortar fire from YD 096623 resulting
in one KIA, three WIA's med-evac and one WIA non-evac.
C-3
was a Marine Corps installation that was part of the "McNamara Line,"
almost 8 miles south of the DMZ in Quang Tri Province, South Vietnam. The
Marine KIA in this mortar attack was 1stLt. Norman E. Lane Jr., age 27. A
graduate of Vanderbilt University, where he had majored in English and had been
an outstanding student in the inaugural term of the Vanderbilt-in-France
program, Lt. Lane's home of record was Brownsville, Tennessee, a small town
sixty miles northeast of Memphis, where I grew up. I can only say that I
remember Norman, and we did meet at least a few times—but I was not old enough
to have been his close friend.
In
life—and in death—the story of Norman Lane is like a prism. But unlike an
ordinary prism, which disperses light into the colors of the spectrum, this
prism transforms a dramatic period in American history—the years 1960-1968—into
individual pictographs that tell of the exploits of those who passed by. . . .
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we
follow?
Quick, said the bird, find
them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the
first gate,
Into our first world, shall we
follow
The deception of the thrush?
Into our first world.
—T.S.
Eliot, "Burnt Norton"
Al Claiborne
Winston-Salem, North Carolina
February, 2019
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